China is among the world’s leading consumer markets for wildlife extracted both legally and illegally from across the globe. Due to its mega-richness in biodiversity and strong economic ties with China, Southeast Asia (SEA) has long been implicated as a source and transit hub in the transnational legal and illegal wildlife trade with China. Although several cross-border and domestic wildlife enforcement mechanisms have been established to tackle this illegal trade in the region, international legal cooperation and policy coordination between China and its SEA neighbors remain limited in both scope and effectiveness. Difficulties in investigating and prosecuting offenders in overseas jurisdictions, as well as organized criminal groups that sustain the illicit supply chain, continue to undermine efforts by the region’s governments to combat wildlife trafficking. In addition to reviewing the key trends in both the legal and illegal wildlife trade between SEA and China, this paper examines existing legal and policy frameworks in SEA countries and China, and provides a synthesis of evidence on the latest developments in regional efforts to curtail this multibillion-dollar trade. In particular, it discusses how proactive and effective China has been in cooperating with its SEA neighbors on this issue. The paper also draws on the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) framework to suggest pathways to deepen legal cooperation between China and SEA countries in order to disrupt and dismantle transnational wildlife trafficking in the region.

China’s supply-side conservation efforts in the past decades have led to two bewildering juxtapositions: a rapidly expanding farming industry vs. overexploitation, which remains one of the main threats to Chinese vertebrates. COVID-19 was also the second large-scale zoonotic disease outbreak since the 2002 SARS. Here, we reflect on China’s supply-side conservation strategy by examining its policies, laws, and practices concerning wildlife protection and utilization, and identify the unintended consequences that likely have undermined this strategy and made it ineffective in protecting threatened wildlife and preventing zoonotic diseases. We call for China to overhaul its conservation strategy to limit and phase out risky and unsustainable utilization, while improving legislation and enforcement to establish full chain-of-custody regulation over existing utilization.

Escalating global demand for wildlife products and consequential illegal wildlife trade has become one of the major threats to biodiversity conservation. In the recent COVID-19 pandemic, growing public health risks of wildlife trade and consumption have triggered widespread public concern. In this review, we adopt a multidisciplinary perspective, including sociology, psychology, behavioral science and other disciplines, to understand the motivations for wildlife consumption in China, and to propose scientifically guided behavioral change countermeasures. The current state of wildlife consumption in China reveals certain functional, social, experiential and other non-essential needs of wildlife as major drivers of consumption, which are affected by a host of complex factors. Based on our understanding of the drivers of综述 demand, we suggest using behavioral change frameworks, and a variety of behavioral change methods, including education, social influence, regulation and nudging, to effectively influence and change wildlife consumption behavior. For effective implementation of behavioral change strategies, collaboration needs to be strengthened, both among and across diverse disciplines, actors and scales of interest.

China is one of the largest consumer markets in the international legal and illegal wildlife trade. An increasing demand for wildlife and wildlife products is threatening biodiversity, both within China and in other countries where wildlife destined for the Chinese market is being sourced. We analysed official data on legal imports of CITES-listed species in five vertebrate classes (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish), and on enforcement seizures of illegally traded wildlife, during 1997–2016. This is the first study that collates and analyses publicly available data on China's legal and illegal wildlife trade and considers a broad range of species. Specifically, we estimated the scale and scope of the legal and illegal wildlife trade, quantified the diversity of species involved, and identified the major trading partners, hotspots and routes associated with illegal trade. Our findings show that substantial quantities of wildlife have been extracted globally for the Chinese market: during 1997–2016 over 11.5 million whole-organism equivalents and 5 million kg of derivatives of legally traded wildlife, plus over 130,000 illegally traded animals (alive and dead) and a substantial amount of animal body parts and products, were imported into China. Although measures to reduce demand and alleviate poverty are crucial to curb unsustainable and illegal wildlife trade in the longer term, China's wildlife regulators and enforcers must take urgent measures to disrupt the supply chains from source to market.

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